1. Technical Field
This invention generally relates to an apparatus for drying newborn animals and more particularly to an apparatus for holding newborn animals such as calves in an upright position in a warm, forced air environment.
2. Background Art
There is a segment of the ranching industry which is generally known as the cow-calf operation. It is that portion of the ranching industry which deals with the birth of calves at the beginning of the beef production cycle. While it does vary somewhat with geographic location and climatic conditions, it generally revolves around the use of public range land as forage ground for breeding cows, commonly known as mother cows, and their young, which are for the most part destined for the feedlots.
The production cycle begins sometime in the winter or early spring with the calving of the mother cows to produce a new crop of young calves. The typical cow-calf operation usually requires between 100 and 400 mother cows. The cycle of breeding is timed so that the mother cows all calve within a month or so of each other, and at a time during the winter early enough to insure that the newborn calves have reached a body weight of between 200 to 300 pounds by the time the herd is let out onto the open range. If for example, the open range is available for forage from May until October, then the calving operation will be timed so that the calves are born in January and February.
Cow-calf operations require a home base pasture facility, usually located where the rancher lives, so that he can attend to the herd when it is not on the open range. Ideally, the home base operation is located in a sheltered valley.
In the general production cycle, calves are born in December, January or February, are kept with the mother cows in a pasture, and introduced, with the mother cows, to the open range in the spring, generally in May or June, at a body weight of between 200 and 300 pounds.
The mother cows will care for the calves, and the two will forage together over the summer months. As a general rule, mother cows will continue to nurse the calves during these summer months, thereby providing for optimal weight gain on the calves. While each mother cow is different, mother cows will not naturally wean a calf until it weighs approximately 600 pounds.
In the fall, usually in September or October, the cows and their calves are rounded up and herded into loading pens from where they are transported by truck back to the home base of operations. The roundup is still conducted by men and women on horseback in much the same way as it was when the western United States was first settled.
At the time the cows and calves are brought in from the range, the calves will generally weigh between 500 and 600 pounds and will either have been just weaned by the mother cow, or are ready for separation from her by the rancher. The calves are then either held over the winter at the home base, placed in a feedlot, or sold to other ranchers who will hold and feed them until they weigh between 700 and 1000 pounds when they are sold to a commercial feedlot for what is called finishing out, prior to slaughter.
Since many of the cow-calf rancher's costs are fixed or are dependant on the size of the breeding herd as opposed to being dependant on or directly related to the size of the calf crop, the loss of a calf represents a loss of income without a corresponding loss of expenses. This translates to a direct loss of profits. Loss of as little as 5% of the calf crop can result in a net financial loss to the rancher for the entire year.
The problem is that the most perilous time for the calf is the few hours immediately after birth. During the first hour or two after birth, the calf must do two things before the mother cow will accept it as her own and raise it. First it must get up off the ground, and the second, it must suckle the mother cow. If the calf does these two things, the mother cow will accept it and will take care of it.
The mother cow, immediately after calving, will instinctively get up, turn around, and start licking the wet calf, which is covered with afterbirth, in order to dry it. She will also nudge it and attempt to coax it onto its feet so that it will find the udder and start suckling. If the calf is dead, or otherwise cannot get up, she will instinctively clean what portions of the calve's fur coat are exposed and available to her and, after a few hours, start to wander away from the calf, eventually abandoning it. This sad process takes between one and three days, depending upon the breeding stock and the individual mother cow, with the mother cow returning to the exact site of calving periodically during this time period, to check to see if the calf is present, alive and able to suckle. She will return to the exact calving site periodically even if the calf's body has been removed.
Unfortunately, because of the time constraints, the requirement that the calf be a certain minimum weight prior to its introduction to the range in the spring, the calving time or period occurs during the cold winter months when inclement weather is likely. Calving of the breeding stock occurs more or less continuously during both the night and the day and regardless of the weather. It is not unusual for mother cows to be calving and giving birth in a pasture in the middle of the night during a snow storm.
When calving occurs during this kind of inclement weather, it is not uncommon for the wet newborn calf to be too weak or fatigued, at the time of birth, to be able to immediately get up onto its feet. As previously stated, the mother cow will attempt to coax and encourage it to get up, but if it does not get up within the first few minutes, its wet hair, in contact with the ground will freeze, sometimes even freezing to the ground. This phenomenon is called, in the industry, freezing down.
If a calf freezes down, it chills, and weakens very quickly and will die and in hour or two of hypothermia. The mother cow will continue to clean and dry the fur exposed, but if the calf if frozen down, she cannot clean the underside next to the ground. If the calf if frozen to the ground it is, of course, impossible for the calf to get up and as long as the condition continues, death is inevitable within a few hours.
The result to the rancher, if for example 10% of the breeding stock calves during a snowstorm, is a major financial loss. As a result, ranchers and their helpers will keep a vigil during the inclement weather to insure that the calves get up and are dried by the mother cows. If for some reason a calf does not get up, the rancher will usually pick it up and take it to shelter where it can be dried with a towel and kept warm until the weather moderates. It is not uncommon that this place of warm and dry shelter for baby calves is in a ranch house basement or the bathtub. Also, doing this is not a pleasant task for the ranchers since the baby calf will weigh between 70 pounds to 100 pounds and will be covered with a combination of melted and frozen afterbirth, which makes it very difficult and unpleasant to hand carry the calf.
As a result, development efforts have been made to provide animal carriers such as the calf sled disclosed in Hayden, U.S. Pat. No. 4,567,853.
Even if the calf is brought into a barn, or a basement, or even the rancher's bathtub, there is still a problem in that the calf is too weak to stand up. It will continue to lie down, usually upon its wet, frozen side. This prolongs the hypothermic condition, and in general, the calf will not recover as quickly as it would if it were standing and completely dried. Thus even if taken to shelter, a significant number of calves still die, primarily because of the delayed recovery from hypothermia.
Ideally, once the calf is inside a warm sheltered area, the rancher can get it standing on its feet and dry it off. And within a day or two, return it to the exact spot at which it was born, being relatively sure that the mother cow will be watching this spot, and will return to it to reclaim her calf, at least during the first one to three days. Once the mother cow and calf have been reunited, the rancher can assist the calf to start suckling the mother's teats, after which mother nature and instinct take over as the mother cow accepts the calf and begins to care for it.
What is needed is an apparatus which dries a newborn calf or other newborn animal and enables it stand on its feet. Accordingly, it is an object of this invention to provide an apparatus which holds a calf or newborn animal in an upright or on its feet position and provides a circulation of warm air to dry the animal. A second object is to provide an apparatus which provides a warm comfortable environment for a newborn calf of other animal in order to give the animal time to recover from hypothermia or exposure incurred in the moments after birth.